Race on Display in 20th- and 21st Century France

Katelyn E. Knox

The book is timely; it intervenes in one of the most hotly debated and widely discussed issues in contemporary France: the relationship between race, ethnicity, and national identity

The book analyses works at the heart of ongoing controversy and scandal (notably Brett Bailey's performance art piece 'Exhibit B' and Said Bouamama and rap group Z.E.P.'s 2010 album Devoir d'Insolence, for which the authors faced a lawsuit ultimately dismissed in 2015) as well as authors who, as recent recipients of top literary awards in France, are garnering significant attention in university classrooms (Alain Mabanckou received the French Academy's highest prize, the Prix Henri-Gal, for his entire corpus in 2012 and in 2013 Léonora Miano's novel La Saison de l'ombre was awarded the Prix Femina)

The book's cultural studies methodology brings together works from a variety of media that will resonate with its readers' preexisting diverse interests in printed literature, children's comics, performance art, popular music, music videos, fashion, and dance

The book situates itself at the forefront of whiteness studies in the Francophone world

Race on Display in 20th- and 21st Century France

First Edition

Katelyn E. Knox

Description

In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France's rhetoric of 'internal otherness', asking her reader not to spot those deemed France's others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children's comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial 'human zoos' invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made-and make themselves-visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical 'blind spot' in French cultural studies-whiteness-before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France's 'visible minorities' face.